Surangama Sutra Exposition
by Living Buddha Lian Sheng, Grandmaster Sheng-Yen Lu
We need to cultivate our minds until we view everything as equal. When the six roots and six dusts are gone, our wondrous luminous true mind will surface.
“Ananda! It is like people in the world who gather their seeing in their eyes. If you have them quickly close their eyes, a dark appearance presents itself before them. Their six roots become dim, and they cannot tell head from foot. But if that person uses his hands to trace around the body, although he cannot see, he can still distinguish head from foot—his awareness and perception remain the same.
The condition for seeing is light; when it is dark, there is no seeing. But when the luminosity naturally shines forth without relying on light, then all appearances of darkness can never obscure it. Since the roots and dusts have already dissolved, how could awakened luminosity not become perfectly wondrous?”
Most sentient beings rely on the six roots to sense and perceive. With the eyes, one can see everything. However, when the eyes are closed or when one is in complete darkness with all the lights off, one cannot see anything. The roots become dim and lose their functions.
When the eyes don’t see, the ears hear no sounds, the tongue tastes nothing, the nose doesn’t sense the breath, the body has no tactile sensations, and the mind consciousness is absent, all six roots are eliminated. Similarly, when one closes one’s eyes and falls asleep, all sensations vanish. We no longer sense where our head or legs are.
The Buddha did not elaborate further on this, so Grandmaster explains that the wondrous luminous true mind is unspeakable.
Grandmaster disagrees with the Buddha’s analogy that one can distinguish the head from the foot simply by using the hands to trace the body. He cites the Chinese idiom, “blind men perceiving an elephant.” Several blind men touch different parts of an elephant, and each comes to a different conclusion about what an elephant is—feeling the body, it feels like a wall; feeling the trunk, it feels like a snake; feeling the tusk, it feels hard and curvy; feeling the leg, it feels like a tree trunk; etc. Although our hands may make contact, if we are blind, the image we perceive can still differ from reality.
Amazingly, when these six roots and six dusts are extinguished, the wondrous luminous true mind emerges. One can then sense everything across all spatial and time dimensions, know the past, present, and future, and everything in the ten dharma realms. As such, neither darkness nor light can affect the wondrous luminous true mind.
It is not something one thinks of. It is without awareness and without dwelling. It is neither mind nor mental objects. When we sever the six roots and six dusts, we attain the level of an arhat, one of the four sagely realms.
People in the saha world rely on the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the nose to smell, the tongue to taste, the body to feel, the brain or mind consciousness to know. However, once we realize the wondrous luminous true mind, we no longer need to rely on the six roots or the material world to know. Only this is true knowing and true seeing. We must cultivate until we can see without relying on physical eyes. What is perceived with the physical eyes [or with any of the other roots] may be incorrect and unreliable. Only the wondrous luminous true mind can never be wrong!
To the ordinary eye, a woman wearing a long dress creates a different perception than one wearing a miniskirt. If someone were to wear a bikini to the temple, people would point fingers and object. Yet these are merely external appearances. Clothed or not, it’s all the same—the clothing is just a false front. No one sees the true self; they only see superficially. The wondrous luminous true mind does not discern external appearances, so it does not matter what one wears. We need to cultivate until [we view] everything as equal.